Instagram says Thanksgiving 2013 was its busiest day so far, but fails to share exact figures

Instagram today announced that Thanksgiving 2013 in the US was “the busiest day on Instagram so far,” thanks to a massive flood of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah-related photos and videos. Unfortunately, the company failed to share exact figures, suggesting that if any records were broken, they weren’t huge.

That’s a big contrast to last year’s announcement, in which Instagram said Thanksgiving 2012 in the US broke multiple records in addition to being the busiest day for the mobile photo sharing service ever. This year, the “busiest” adjective is repeated again, but the closest we have to specifics is this vague sentence: “We saw record usage as Instagrammers shared a heaping help of holiday cheer.”

Last year, the Facebook-owned company said it saw the number of shared photos more than double from the day before. This year, apparently nothing close to that happened.

There are many potential explanations for a lack of new numbers. While Instagram is still the leader in the mobile photo sharing space, it’s no longer way ahead of the competition, like it was last year, for one simple reason: there’s more competition.

The Facebook-owned company now has to deal with Vine and Snapchat. Add to that all the various messaging apps that support sharing media files, and competing for mobile users’ photo and video time gets even harder.

Instagram’s press page also hasn’t been updated since Thanksgiving: the social network still sits at 16 billion photos total, with over 55 million photos uploaded each day. Facebook averages about 350 million photos uploaded daily (although that number refers to Q4 2012). Neither service breaks out video numbers.

Update: There was some confusion as to whether yesterday was Instagram’s biggest day so far or just the biggest Thanksgiving so far. Instagram confirmed with TNW that “yesterday was our busiest day ever.”

Emil was a reporter for The Next Web between 2012 and 2014. Over the years, he has covered the tech industry for multiple publications, including Ars Technica, Neowin, TechSpot, ZDNet, and CNET. Stay in touch via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.